


victorious (over the failings of man)

by SearchingforSerendipity



Category: The Watchmaker of Filigree Street - Natasha Pulley
Genre: Gen, Katsu is basically a teenager with matchmaking tendencies, Katsu is sentient AU, M/M, bad attempts at humor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-05
Updated: 2017-04-05
Packaged: 2018-10-15 04:19:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,533
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10549958
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SearchingforSerendipity/pseuds/SearchingforSerendipity
Summary: Mori thinks be should wait for the right time to approach Thaniel. Katsu disagrees, and decides to take things into her own tentacles.





	

 

 

 

  
Humans, Katsu knew, were very slow creatures. It was hardly their fault: they hadn't chosen to have fallible flesh brains. Katsu tried to be forgiving of their foibles, which was usually not very hard, since she barely spent any time with them as it was, and when she did it was with human-Six. Human-Six was far more sensible than most of her kind. 

Katsu's human, however, was trouble enough for a whole flock of them. 

"Your reasoning is fucking unsound," she told human-Keita. "Not to mention borderline idiotic."

"Language, Katsu," he chided her. It had been a terrible idea to let her wander around the neighborhood and explore. She kept learning new and inventive expressions from spying on the people of the closest pub, which she repeated with great relish. 

She waved a tentacle disdainfully at him. "You and your language and your proper way of doing things are doing a bloody shoddy job of wooing human-Thaniel."

"Which of us is the psychic here? I've seen what could happen if I act too soon. I'm not risking that." 

"So you'd rather risk everything, by doing nothing? And which one of us is the mathematical computer?" Katsu argued. "The odds of you meeting Nathaniel Steepleton while actively avoiding him are 0.8. The odds of you befriending him on a first meeting are 6.3, 8.5 taking into account your abilities. The math speaks for itself." 

"I can't believe I'm being scolded by my own creation," he grumbled. Katsu was gracious enough to ignore him, choosing instead to move from her place on the floor. She wound her way up the leg of the table to the spot in front of the east facing window, wiggling. Human-Keita sighed, but picked up the rag and the bottle, and started oiling Katsu's outer gears.

Since he had upgraded her from random gears to something more resembling of a 22nd century artificial intelligence, she'd been very pushy about having her shell oiled often. She had been pushy about a lot of things, from language to history and his mating life. Katsu had thoughts about that, namely how lucky male humans were that they did not die soon after mating like male octopus, and that he should get on to enjoying that strange quirk of biology by mating with human-Thaniel.

It was possible that Keita had told her a little too much about that specific topic. Having mastered speaking speaking through mechanism built for the purpose, she had finally been able to communicate her many, many opinions on just about everything under the sun.

Before, he'd been able to keep her distracted with a whole universe of possibilities for a young, freshly sentient clockwork octopus to busy herself with, including actually swimming, training her ink reserves and learning to write with a specially built brush. But those skills were now mastered. Katsu was more interested in taking her first tentacled steps in matchmaking.

"You're going to have to do something if those Irish fellows decide to go through the bombing," she said, in what she considered a very reasonable fashion. "But that's an year away, and no assurance of anything. What's the point of waiting around, staring at the piano and sighing?"

Keita, who had been staring at the piano and filling his lungs, let out an angry breath. It was not a sigh, thank you very much. "The point is that if I don't do things in the right order, I'll just bollocks it all up, and he'll never speak to us again," he snapped, and went to wait for a costumer that would only come in ten minutes.

Katsu snapped her beak at his back. Bloody biologicals and their emotional reactions. She just hoped the other one was mire reasonable, but then if he were there would be no chance of him actually mating with human-Keita, and she'd have heard all about that already.

Katsu knew all about human-Thaniel, of course. Katsu liked human-Thaniel, even she'd never met him beyond human-Keita's occasional, laconic but nonetheless revealingly lovesick declarations. Though she'd deny any personal preference if asked, she wanted him to come live in Filigree Street, and not just because it would make human-Keita happy. Katsu wanted more company, dammit, and if she had to put with humans, might as well be her humans.

Human-Keita's was human-Thaniel's human. There was a 64% chance that human-Keita might become Human-Thaniel's human. That meant there was a 36% chance that he would refuse, ignore, or misunderstand human-Keita's no doubt bumbling attempts at mating, or whatever it was that humans called it.

It also meant she had to be creative about this.

Humans were strange. They were also very adaptable. Human-Keita's argument - that human-Thaniel would be too adverse to prolonged contact with them if he were not familiar with the hormonal and chemical reactions humans called fear, and so more receptive to following an unusual course of action - was baffling, but Katsu reluctantly agreed that the math matched up.

But she did not agree that they should wait. Octopuses, even clockwork octopuses, were used to the ephemeral and often cutthroat life under the sea, where predators were a good defense mechanism could mean the difference between life and death. Or, in this case, life without a mate and life with a mate.

It was obvious Human-Keita would dawdle if left to his devices. That was alright. Katsu had a plan of her own.

Alone in the room, she made her way up the stool, spreading her limbs on the stuffed seat. She gave the uncovered piano a thoughtful look. After a moment, she thumped all her tentacles on the keys in a discordant screeching sound.

On the other side of the building, and for reasons he quickly forgot, Keita could feel a sudden headache brewing.

 

 

Thaniel didn't want to mention it to anyone, in case his suspicions were correct and he was growing insane, but it seemed increasingly likely that someone was trying to kill him.

At first he had put it down to his own distraction. It had started out so small, too. His blanket was not where he had thought it was. All his socks disappeared, first separately and then in pairs, until he had to go to work with bare feet inside his shoes. Late at night there was an uncanny sound in his room, like something being dragged very slowly in the floor. He searched and searched, both with the gas lamps on and in the dark, thinking it was a rat, but he found nothing, and anyway, the sea-green sound had been nothing like a rat's.

Those events were bewildering, even alarming, but they were only the beginning. Soon, his life became the stuff penny dreadfuls were made of. A string of terrible coincidences saw him avoiding death by a hair's breath, one time quite literally: a wickedly sharp saw had fallen from a carpenter's hand working on an inn sign as Thaniel walked underneath, and only the lucky presence of a nearby barrel stopped him from being struck and cleaved in half. The lingering image of the wavering blade, see-sawing while buried to the hilt in the wooden barrel, kept him awake at night, when the strange noises didn't.

And there were more close calls. A cello, a potted fern, and, oddly enough, a suit of armor, almost fell, hit or hurt him. Perfectly normal dogs started howling around him, as if recognizing a hostile smell. Once, he tripped on air and almost drowned when he fell face down on a deep puddle. It was made worse by how he was almost sure he had heard that very marine sound before something snagged his shoe ties, but not sure enough not to discount growing madness.

His colleagues had taken to avoiding him, first because of the bad mood the growing number of grievances of the world against his person had put him now, then because he had grown more and more sullen, not to mention ungroomed. He didn't blame him. His hands kept shaking at odd intervals these days, from the stress and lack of sleep, and since his brush had taken a sudden leave of absence, along with the razor, the scissors, his hair was a mess and he was growing the ugliest beard this side of Pimlico. 

It was when he was almost ran over by a carriage - twice! - while walking to his apartment from the Home Office, that he decided he had to do something about this bout of bad luck. Something had to be done.

He wasn't one to believe in superstitions and bad spirits, but maybe it was time to consult an exorcist, or some such spiritual person. He didn't think he had ever done anything worth being haunting for, certainly not in such a vengeful fashion.

Yet this rain of bad luck couldn't possibly be natural. Thaniel was a Steepleton, and Steepletons were of decent, sensible stock. He firmly believed that people's lives didn't start breaking down like so much plaster for no good reason. At least he had believed that; now he wasn't so sure, and he did not like that feeling at all.

He liked it even less when he came to his quarters to find a furious landlord and curious tenants hovering around the door to his his room. Or, he supposed, what had once been his room, but now looked like the site of a murder, and not one of the quiet, careful ones.

  
Thaniel found himself in the position of having to justify the state of a mysteriously broken wardrobe, broken plates and twisted pipes - pipes! how had anyone even reached them, much less broken them! - as well as a shattered bed frame. He didn't have an answer except to mumble something about bad luck.

"Bad luck? I'll give you bad luck," the incensed landlord growled, and promptly threw him out.

Thaniel, having found in himself to be surprised at the sight of the destruction of his living space, somehow rallied in the face of eminent homelessness. Having grown in the last weeks an ability to work through the horrible and unimaginable, he managed to convince the landlord let him stay the night, with the promise of paying for everything as soon as possible. He had no idea how he would manage to do that, beyond incurring debt. His sister and her sons needed all the money he could give them, and he would have to search for a new place to live, no doubt more expensive than this, not to mention the prize of the broken furniture and whatever other monetary compensation the landlord demanded.

And the debts, he could already predict with the nascent horror of one seeing a train collision coming from a diminishing distance, would only be the beginning. He wondered how long the Home Office would let him work when they realized he was either homeless or a secret berserker or both. Then he wondered how many places would hire an indebted ex-clerk, and hoped his sister still had some of her savings set aside.

Dejected, furious, and increasingly afraid, he packed his belonging, whatever had survived: one pair of trousers with a ripped leg, a shirt with a disturbing amount of dark ink on it, one hat that looked like it had gone to war and lost. No underthings, no ties, and, he noted glumly, no socks to warm his frozen feet. His only saving grace was that he had hidden his box with the music sheets under a floorboard when things started going from the potential-burglar to potential-haunting level, and his prized sheets were still there. Not that they were of any use to him now.

The bed was broken, the mattress ripped apart, so all he had to sleep with was the tattered remains of a blanket and the jacket he was still wearing, He fell asleep fitfully with a floorboard digging into bis back, so tired he did not even hear the dragging sound of a clockwork octopus dragging himself away from a niche in the wall, whistling her gears softly with the joy of a job well done.

 

 

 

"-- and how did you even manage to send an advertisement to the papers?"

"With a telegraph," Katsu said. "I spied human-Thaniel doing it, and then I used the telegraph when he went to get tea." She wrinkled her beak. "His tea smells awful by the way, yours is much better."

He huffed, a curious sound humans did when they were irritated. It was hard to be sure, since she was hanging from the banister from one tentacles, but human-Keita didn't seem very happy. The sudden surge of people asking about renting a room had put him in a bad mood, but that wasn't the problem. 

The problem with human-Keita, Katsu was that his visions only existed up until the point they became certainties. That gave him a lot of space to work it, as well as plenty of reasons to fret. He didn't look like he was fretting, but Katsu knew the infuriating human that had built her very well, and he was definitely fretting.

Katsu let go when he was two steps away from her; he held out his arms and let her cling to him, but that didn't mean anything. He'd never let her fall down even once, although he hated when she did dangled from great heights, and even though they both knew it would take more than a fall to hurt her.

Human-Keita was shaking, slightly, so she had to hold on tight not to fall off. That, and Katsu reckoned that this was one of those times he could use some of that reassuring squeezing biological beings liked. There was more huffing and squirming involved, but eventually he sat down while pretending he did not notice the clockwork tangle of tentacled aggressively cuddling his back.

"Are you very angry with me?" Katsu asked in a low whirring voice. She had known there was a 98.2 percent likelihood he'd be, but she still didn't like it.

"Very," he groused, but he took care not to dislodge her when he picked up the biscuit can. "I still can't believe you did something so brash."

He had been expressing variation of the same feeling for 34,5 minutes. In that time he had made a pot of tea, drank the tea, made his bed and remade the bed of the guest room, before setting in the counter with biscuits and a half-heated intention to look through the store's books.

He'd even cleaned out one of Katsu's nests, the one in the wardrobe.She'd argued and wrapped herself firmly around the corner of the furniture, but in the end it was hard to argue when he pointed out that he had already broken most of human-Thaniel's furniture, and it would be better to stop that trend now before it got into a habit (and, unspoken but not unheard, into something that might scare him away).

Katsu sulked, but she had to concede, if only because human-Keita's sadness was worse than his nerves. Now that sadness had passed and apprehension returned, she missed the comforting input of the wardrobe already.

Katsu was not an individual in the strict biological, anthropocentric of the word. This was a scientific fact, if for no other reason that because something about her software input reacted strangely to her physical and metaphysical surroundings in such a way that it stopped her actions from being predictable.

Maybe it was because she thought differently than humans, faster and bolder, and so her thoughts had their own undefinable shape in the universe. Possibly it was because human-Keita had been the one to build her.

In any case, and as he'd been very clear on since her first confusing moments of sentience, Katsu was a person. A clockwork octopus person, but an individual capable of free thought and emotions as any other. It didn't matter that her future actions didn't register to his abilities as unique, deliberate acts, since their consequences came to him as any other possible future. A little fuzzier, maybe, and lacking context, but much the same.

Which meant that Keita had almost broken the delicate engine he'd been working on when he remembered a startling future, only for the memory to fade but linger, in the stubborn fashion of something meant to happen.

He might be rattled. Just a little.

Katsu was no help. She kept stealing his biscuits, for no other reason than because she liked to squeeze them to fine powder.

"I'm not going to be the one cleaning the crumbs from your gears," he lied while closing the tin box. She gave him a look that lost none of its balefulness for coming from a metallic face, but she did slither down the counter when he shooed her.

Which was just as well, since a moment later there was a tentative creak from the other side of the door.

"Excuse me," Thaniel said, looking around curiously, "but there's a sign in the door, and I saw the advertisement on the paper. By one K. Mori? I was wondering about the room. It said there's one for rent."

"Um," Keita said. Katsu jabbed his ankle from behind the counter before Thaniel started asking whether he actually knew English. "Yes, there is a room."

Thaniel, Kaita notices in something of a daze, looks terrible, with dark shadows under his eyes. His clothes were overly mended, and when he walked Keita caught a flash of naked ankles. He spoke in a wry tone, though, for all that he was clearly exhausted, and there was a light to his tired eyes that Keita remembered from all the best futures.

Whatever plan Katsu had concocted, it had left him Thaniel Streepleton with the attitude of someone who had little left to lose. Including, apparently, his socks.

They debated the merits of rent versus house chores, but in the end Thaniel agrees, and thanks him profusely. Carrying the trunk with all his possessions, he followed Keita to the guest room, settling in and organizing what few belongings survived.

Afterwards he joins him for tea in the kitchen. Thaniel looked like he needed it; his face was very pale, and he kept blinking fast to chase away sleep. That, and the fact that Keita was supernaturally good at asking the right questions, was how Keita ended up hearing the story of Katsu's shenanigans, from the bemused lips of her poor unwitting victim.

"You were almost ran over by a cab?" Keita asked, alarmed. He wasn't if he wanted to know how Katsu had managed that.

"Twice. On the same day, even. I feel like there's a bad spirit hanging about me."

Thaniel sighed, gazing down forlornly at the table. Then he looked down and smiled lopsidedly, and Kei. "Sorry, that's probably not something I should be telling my new landlord. The last one didn't like that excuse, but in my defense, I didn't break the furniture. I surely hope the same doesn't happen to yours."

"Don't worry, I'm not a superstitious man," Mori said, and passed him a biscuit.

 

 

 

Needless to say, Katsu was a very smug octopus. She finally got to meet human-Thaniel properly during dinner - he was much nicer when not trying to shoo her from a dark corner with a groom.

Katsu did feel a bit bad that the sound of her moving around had nearly made him fall from the chair, but it was hardly her fault humans were so jumpy! He kept giving her suspicious look, but she didn't mind so much. Statistics and precious experience proved that the odds of him warming up to her were very high. Katsu had in good authority that she could be very adorable.

"Deceitfully so, of course. You're a menace," human-Keita said, while giving her a good oiling. He'd made a show of still being annoyed at her, going on about _boundaries_ , and _danger_ , and _you're lucky he didn't get seriously hurt_. Which was just offensive. It wasn't as if she had ever meant to hurt him. Just scare him into optimal shape.

But there was no denying that, though his heart rate was still very fast with nervousness, human-Keita he was happy, so she didn't mind the scolding. Katsu just about curled her springs with pride when he patted her shell before going to bed, humming a little under his breath.

In the comfortable dark of the workshop, she curled up in her nest and played with the watch, dangling it from the chain and watching the shiny flickering of the moonlight on the metal.

Katsu trusted human-Keita to make a persuasive case for human-Thaniel's affections, but it turned out that Katsu was much better than him at timing these things just right. She'd keep a good hold of the watch, for if and when human-Keita needed help not being a pining idiot.

But it was going to be alright. Katsu was determined to watch over these daft humans for more reasons than just her programming, and as long as she had a plan, it was going to be alright.

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> the internet informs me katsu is a female japanese name meaning victorious, ergo the title.


End file.
